It’s mid-winter break for New York City schools, which means it’s the first of three breaks - mid-winter, spring, and summer’s supersized version - during which parents, Mom and Buried and I included, are responsible for filling their kids’ time.
Having to fill your kids’ time is an underrated aspect of parenting, and by underrated I mean a harder and more annoying aspect than people think. And it’s mostly a modern phenomenon.
Back in the day, outside of school and camp and extracurricular stuff like little league or school clubs—and those were things supervised by other adults—parents didn’t do all that much to keep their kids occupied. In the 80s, none of the parents I knew gave a shit if their kids were bored. At best, they thought it built character (which: agreed), and at worst, they didn’t even know we were bored. They often didn’t even know where we were!
When I was a kid, the minute I woke up on the weekend I would hop on my bike to roam the neighborhood—or to roam other neighborhoods towns away—or to go to a friend’s house, and I’d be gone all day. No cell phones, no Apple tags, no clue; my parents would have no idea if I was lost or in jail or at the bottom of a ditch until I (hopefully) got home. If my friends and I were bored, that was our problem.
Nowadays, kids are much less likely to have such freedom, for many reasons, some legit and some less so, and parents are much more likely to be playmates and pals. Our lives are more entwined with our kids’ than ever, and our kids rely on us to keep them entertained. Without parents’ interaction or assistance or itineraries, kids are less able to fend for themselves and are more dependent on Mom and Dad. Which has its benefits - families are closer than ever these days!
Years ago, school breaks and family vacations were a rare opportunity for parents and kids to all be together and bond. No work, no school; nothing but each other. But these days, most of us are around each other all the time. So without the budget for a big trip or extra bells and whistles, it’s harder and harder to fill that vacation without that time feeling like more of the same.
The downside is that children have gotten so used to having their parents keep them occupied that when they don’t, they have trouble filling it themselves. And parents are so overwhelmed with the 24/7/365 grind of adulthood and parenthood, that breaks are few and far between.
And the easiest solution—for both kids and parents—is often screen time. When kids are on screens, they’re occupied, and we know where they are, and we’re able to step away and have a few minutes to ourselves, to do the dishes or to take a nap or to scream into the void.
It’s hard work filling someone else’s days, it takes a toll; I don’t begrudge parents for using screen time to get a respite. Even while everyone else does. (And while I judge my kids for not being able to fend without it!)
Social Media Round-up
Following Up
Last week, I wrote a piece about the dumb-ass anti-gun-reform/control/safety arguments that the gun fetishists use. The piece was a frustrated responses to seeing those same nonsensical arguments being regurgitated in my Instagram comments after I posted about the Kansas City shooting. Unfortunately, I wrote the piece while riding the Metro-North train from NYC to my parents’ in CT. And I missed a couple.
So I figured I’d address them here real quick. So here are the two major excuses/deluded rationalizations/batshit justifications for why we can never do a single thing about the gun problem in this country.
Good guys with a gun - This is one of the most absurd arguments of them all. The “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” argument is nonsense because, as I’ve written before, in a world full of shark attacks, no sane person would try to solve that problem by adding more sharks to the ocean. But beyond that, all these noble Chuck Norris wannabes with guns have had plenty of chances to save the day already and I’m sad to say they almost never have. (When was the last shooting that someone prevented with a gun? Not KC - those heroes were unarmed; not Parkland not Buffalo not Orlando…) Instead, the so-called good guys stand around, like the cops at Uvalde, or they accidental shoot themselves (or someone else), or they simply aren’t good guys, like Kyle Rittenhouse, that asshole kid every conservative worships, who wasn’t interested in defending anything; he just wanted to shoot someone and had plenty of opportunity to do so because this is the land of the free!
All these mass shootings are false flag operations instituted by the government to provide a pretext for taking away all of guns - Forget absurd, this one is infuriating. It’s so clearly a result of people getting brainwashed by the constant fear-mongering of their favorite “news” channels and podcast hosts and demagogues and social media bubbles, so insanely transparent a way for those fearmongers to keep their constituents cowed and under their thumbs, under the guise of “freedom” and “protection” and being an “alpha male,” that it’s impossible to prenetrate. People who believe conspiracies like this are so far gone that even when one of their aforementioned heroes gets sued into oblivion for suggesting Sandy Hook was a hoax, they don’t back down. But hey, maybe they’re right! Maybe the government is priming us, maybe the democrats, that comically disorganized group, are continually staging mass shootings at schools and malls and churches until one of them hits *just right* to finally the door for a big coup or gun heist or whatever the hell. Sure, the murder of kindergartners didn’t move the needle even an inch, but someday! We just have to hit our 500,000th school shooting before we can celebrate and finally confiscate all the guns. Can’t wait!